Quick! The iodine...!

Just a few snippets from old magazines reminding people to reach for that iodine...

Iodine Wine aka IOWINE

SALUT!

We extract the following from the Medical Times and Gazette: "The vacancy in the section of Therapeutics and Medical National History at the Academie de Medicine, having to be filled up, this time, by a member representing the therapeutical division, two of the candidates have just read papers before the Academy in support of their claims. That of M. Boinet bore the title: "The means of administering Iodine in a completely soluble state, and entirely deprived of its irritating properties." As perhaps no practitioner has employed iodine, in its various forms, more abundantly than M. Boinet, what he has to say on the subject must have great weight. The accidents which were met with when iodine was first introduced, he observes, were due to portions of this substance remaining undissolved, and acting as foreign bodies. Some of these, at once, disappeared when the iodine had been rendered soluble by the agency of potassium. But others arose which were wrongfully attributed to the iodine, such as tumefaction of the mucous membrane, salivation, lachrymation, gastralgia, &c. These M. Boinet is convinced, really arise from the potassium with which the iodine is combined, for results of an analogous character are observed during the use of other salts having potassium as a base, as chlorate and nitrate of potass. Now, the solubility of the iodine may be still preserved, while the inconvenient effects alluded to may be obviated by substituting tannic acid- for the potassium. The tincture of iodine of the French codex is not a completely soluble prepararation, but may be rendered so by the addition of some tannic acid. But M. Boinet thinks, further, that advantage might be derived from recurring in some sort to the practice of our forefathers of employing iodine in a state of more natural combination, as in the form of burnt sponge, marine plants, natural mineral waters, &c.— the greater molecular division facilitating the absorption of the constituent principles. It is only since chemistry has shown us that these various substances contained iodine that we have become aware to what agent they owed their curative properties—properties no less real than those belonging to our modern pharmaceutical preparations. The investigations of Chatin and others have shown that iodine is abundantly distributed throughout organic and inorganic matter, and that there are less goitre and scrofula in those countries where it is most prevalent. For all these reasons, M. Boinet thinks it desirable to resort to these more natural preparations, they being as efficacious and less injurious than those now in use. To this end, he has devised a natural iodine wine which, while it produces no ill effects upon the digestive organs, is of easy absorption and assimilation. It is prepared by placing in a wooden vessel alternate layers of raisins and of marine plants reduced to powder, until the vessel is filled, and then allowing the whole to ferment during a fortnight, and treating it as ordinary wine. A useful combination of iodine is thus produced by which the affections to which this substance is apblicable may be advantageously treated."

The administration of the natural iodine waters produces none of the inconveniences against which M. Boinet would guard us. It is the magnitude of the dose which is the cause of the unfavorable symptoms following the use of iodine, to which he refers ; and it is to the infinitesimal quantities of minutely divided, and therefore, highly soluble iodine, that the natural preparations, to which he purposes to return, owe their superior virtues.—Mon. Hom. Review.

source: The American homeopathist, Volumes 1-2, 1865

On the Preparation of a Natural Iodine Wine.

Originally administered in the natural state and dissolved in water by Coindet, iodine has been exhibited much more efficaciously through the intervention of iodide of potassium, as recommended by Dr. Lugol. This latter salt, indeed, has been almost completely substituted for it, and it is nearly exclusively in this form that internal treatment with iodine is effected.

Reason, however, points out that advantage is gained in giving medicaments in a state as nearly as possible like that in which they are found in nature; and, indeed, iodide of potassium, on account of the special action which it exerts on the mucous membranes of the eye, nose, and larynx, offers real inconveniences, and is impossible to be taken by some persons.

Under these circumstances, M. Debauque has opened a way which promises to be of service in showing how to render iodine soluable in tannin without the aid of iodide of potassium. From this has arisen M. Boinet's idea of administering iodine in liquors or syrups containing tannic acid, such as the wines of horse-raddish, quinine, gentian, walnut, or orange peel.

Arguing upon the good results effected by iodine contained in mineral waters, certain salts and plants, and burnt sponge, although these only contain very small quantities, remembering the results which he had already obtained by the incorporation of this metalloid into articles of food (iodised alimentation) ; and as he has repeatedly said, to get farther from the laboratory and nearer to nature, M. Boinet has been induced to search for a preparation of this kind which would not have upon the tongue, throat, nor the stomach, the ill effects of ordinary iodine wines, which are usually prepared by the addition of tincture of iodine or iodine of potassium. This is what he does:—

At the time of vintage commence by picking the grapes so as only to have them ripe and fit to make good wine. They must not be picked off the bunch, on account of the tannin and salts contained by the stalk, which serve to preserve the wine and aid fermentation. They are placed in a large wooden tub capable of holding many barrels of wine. At the bottom is placed a thick layer of grapes, then above a layer of powdered seaweed, or even a layer of asher of these plants; then a fresh layer of grapes, then another layer of seaweed, and so on until the tub is full. The whole is then covered with a layer of chopped straw to keep the air away and favor fermentation. The important operation of working now commences, which lasts from fifteen to twenty days, according to the temperature. When the wine is fit to draw off—that is to say, when the fermentation is complete and the grape sugar changed into alcohol and carbonic acid, and it has dissolved and assimilated to itself the iodine contained in the weeds—it is placed in casks, keeping it as much as possible from contact with the air. To effect this, it must be drawn from the tub by means of a tap. The concluding operations are effected as with ordinary wine. This wine is, however, nothing more than a tincture of iodine, obtained like other tinctures, as that of aloes, opium, &c., by maceration and fermentation.

This wine M. Boinet calls natural iodine wine. It keeps as well as ordinary wine, and has not, like syrups, the inconvenience of fermenting and decomposing. It contains so much iodine that it can even be mixed with other wine before being administered. The dose may be two or three spoonfuls unmixed per day for adults, and the same in coffee for children. M. Boinet usually administers it in the following manner:

In the wine usually drank at meals, or in any other beverage, a spoonful of this iodine wine is mixed at each meal. This wine has no disagreeable taste, and were invalids not told of it, they would not suspect that they were taking iodine or wine containing iodine.— Bull, de Therap. ; Chemical News.

source: Journal of materia medica, Volume 4, 1862

Healing Hands

A poor woman living in the neighborhool of Hartlepool, England, some years ago was induced by a "wise woman" to go alone at night to an outhouse where a suicide lay awaiting the coroner's inquest and to hold the hand of the corpse on her wen all night. She died shortly after from mental shock. Another woman at Cuddesden, Oxfordshire, asked for the hand of a corpse in order to cure a goiter. Her father, she said, had been cured by the same means, the swelling having diminished as the hand mouldered away. In 1850, it was common for numbers of invalids in certain parts of England to congregate round the gallows in order to receive the " death stroke"—the touch of an executed criminal's hand. The practise declined because of the high fees the hangmen came to charge for applying the remedy.

source: "Popular Science Monthly", Volume LXXXIV

Acute attacks ofbronchocele require the application of leeches and the use of purgatives, to allay excited action, before iodine can be used with advantage. Bronchocele ought always to be submitted to treatment as soon as discovered. If this is done there is seldom much difficulty in it's removal; but if it is allowed to gain a large size, or if it is of old standing, it will resist the most persevering treatment, and perhaps prove a serious cause of inconvenience, especially if it becomes hardened, which it not unfrequently does as life advances. A curious superstition with respect to bronchocele prevails in some of the places in which it is endemic. It is believed that a cure will be effected, if the tumour is rubbed over by the right hand of the corpse of a " bachelor!"

source: "A Dictionary of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery", 1877

A lady who was staying at Penzance in 1859, and was present at a funeral, observed that when the clergyman came to the words, 'Earth to earth,' a woman made her way to the edge of the grave and dropped a cloth upon the coffin, closed her eyes, and apparently said a prayer. On the lady making enquiries as to the reason of this peculiar proceeding, she was informed of the superstition just recorded. The poor people in Launceston and its neighbourhood, say that a swelling in the neck (the goitre or bronchocele, as it is variously termed) may be cured by the patient going before sunrise on the first of May to the grave of the last young man who has been buried in the churchyard, and applying the dew gathered, by passing the hand three times from the head to the foot of the grave, to the part affected by the ailment. 

source: "Bygone days in Devonshire and Cornwall, with notes of existing superstitions" ... by Mary Elizabeth Whitcombe, 1874

"A short time ago, while in the room where the corpse of a lovely young girl lay awaiting burial, I noticed that many of the passing visitors lifted the hand of the dead and applied it to some part of their own bodies—head, arm, face, breast. I was not sure what was meant by this and took occasion afterwards to ask one of those whom I had observed making this application, and was told that it was intended as a cure for various disorders. It appeared that this young girl had lived a notably pure and holy life, and that the touch of such a person was believed to be especially curative against tumors, warts, headache, and minor affections. My informant was, I was assured, immediately cured of a severe headache.

This led me to further inquiry and I found the custom to be widely spread. In two notable and quite recent instances, those of a Carmelite nun dying in Baltimore and a well-known Catholic priest who died in this city, many applications of the dead hand were made with reputed success. In both of these cases throngs of people pressed to obtain the coveted touch. Nor is the belief confined to those of the Roman Catholic faith; a female homoeopathic physician, formerly an army nurse, told me that once during her hospital service two soldier patients, suffering from malarial fever of a persistent type, came to her and asked permission to prepare for burial the next patient who might die. Upon inquiry it was found that they firmly believed that they could "break the chills" by an application of the dead hand, and it was for that reason that they sought this task. They were allowed to make the trial and were thereby speedily cured! Neither of these patients was a Catholic. In another case a white swelling was cured by a murderer's hand surreptitiously obtained. The moral quality of the individual to whom the member belonged seems to be a matter of importance. I was told, by a person who had knowledge of the facts, that, in the burial place for the paupers of this city, graves are not infrequently violated for the purpose of obtaining a hand or an arm, the cadaver being otherwise uninjured.

In Staffordshire and in Galloway it is held that a dead hand rubbed on warts causes them to disappear.* In Berwickshire, a short time ago, applications of the dead hand were made to remove wens, and in Northamptonshire crowds of sufferers used to congregate about the gallows-tree on days of public executions to receive "the dead stroke," nurses even bringing children for the purpose. The swelling is believed to decrease as the body of the criminal moulders away. Eye-witnesses living in 1868 in West Sussex, England, described the revolting ceremony of stroking at the gibbet, and the touch of the dead hand (not criminal) was still used for goitre and other affections, the stroke being applied nine times from east to west and nine times from west to east. Similar occurrences are related at the execution of Dr. Dodd, in 1777, and at the execution of the murderer Crowley, at Warwick, in the year 1845. 

It is needless to say that no record has been kept of the failures of this strange remedy, and the curious critic might imitate the Roman who, on seeing the tablets hung in the temple of Neptune by those who had been delivered by calling on the god, asked to see the tablets of those who had been drowned after a similar appeal.

The reason for these curious superstitions is obvious. The hand is so intimately connected with the brain as the executor of its behests that the savage mind naturally ascribes to it a separate and distinct force independent of the rest of the body—makes it, in fact, a fetish. Savage tribes wear necklaces made from the phalanges of those slain in battle, as witness the Cheyenne necklace of this character recently deposited in the National Museum. A similar custom prevailed among the Greeks, who wore the fingers and toes of a murdered relative under the armpits to avert the vengeance of the Furies.

source: American Anthropologist, Volume 1,  1888

Mr. Editor,

Happening to pass by Newgate on the morning of the execution of the unfortunate John Anderson, my steps were arrested by the contemplation of the termination of this poor wretch's crime. I bad stopped but a few moments, when I observed the executioner untying the criminal's hands, and immediately afterwards a woman ascended the scaffold, and began rubbing the dead hand across her throat- She was succeeded by another  who also exhibited this disgusting and foolish ceremony to us. I have discovered that these silly women are affected with a tumour which the surgeons call "Bronchocele;'' it is frequent in elevated and bleak parts of this island, and commonly known by the general term, Wen. Now, Sir, I had been induced to believe that the age of superstition and charlatanry was past; judge then my surprise when I saw this indelicate and disgusting instance of delusion sanctioned by the officers of the government of this self-called enlightened country ! It surely is the duty of every man, jealous of the honour of his country, to use his endeavours to clear her name from such folly as this ; both because it is folly, and because it is injurious to the weaker-minded part of the community. Allow me then, Sir, through you, to beg my countrywomen to discontinue this practice:—First, because it is of no use.—Secondly, because it is indelicate, and contrary to female modesty, to exhibit the person upon a scaffold before an immense body of people, to rub the throat with the hand of a dead man; and thirdly, because it is wicked, and contrary to religion, to use this species of conjuration.

Let them, on the contrary, seek their cure from those means which reason and experience approve. And there is, Mr. Editor, one remedy, perhaps not enough known, and that is, to dissolve in the mouth gradually, and often in the day, trocks of burnt sponge. This has often effected a cure. There are also other means of relieving this complaint, but it would lake up too much of your room to describe them. But, before I quit the subject, 1 would first suggest, that, as prevention is better than cure, and, as the same causes, operating on the rising generation of females, will produce the same complaint, 

it would be well if the cause were discovered ; that, by avoiding it, we might prevent the disease altogether. Now, this cause will be found to exist in the exposure of the throat to cold and piercing air, in the occupations of the labouring poor. The reason why it does not attack males is, that they have their throats covered, or partially so, from a very early age. And because females in a more comfortable state of life are not so much exposed to the open air, (in those parts of the country where the air more particularly produces it,) the disease is rarely seen amongst them. The conclusion, Mr. Editor, is obvious~ Let the girls of those parts of the country wear dresses that come close up to the chin, and then, Sir, we shall hear only of the " Goitres" of the Alps, or of other countries. 

source: The Busy body, or Men and manners, ed. by Humphrey Hedgehog, 1816

Goitre, the scourge of the Swiss valleys, is sometimes found in our country, and superstition offers a remedy for it, though a revolting one. The late Rev. J. W. Hick, Incumbent of Byer's Green, informed me that on asking a parishioner thus afflicted whether she had tried any measures for curing it, she answered: "No, I have not, though I have been a sufferer eleven years. But a very respectable man told me to-day that it would pass away if I rubbed a dead child's hand nine times across the lump. I've not much faith in it myself, but I've just tried it." Somewhat similar measures were resorted to by another sufferer not many years ago. The body of a suicide who had hanged himself in Hesilden-dene, not far from Hartlepool, was laid in an outhouse, awaiting the coroner's inquest. The wife of a pitman at Castle Eden Colliery, suffering from a wen in the neck, according to advice given her by a "wise woman," went alone and lay all night in the outhouse, with the hand of the corpse on her wen. She had been assured that the hand of a suicide was an infallible cure. The shock to the nervous system from that terrible night was so great that she did not rally for some months, and eventually she died from the wen. This happened about the year 1853, under the cognisance of my informant, the Rev. Canon Tristram. This belief extended, not many years back, as far south as Sussex. "Some five-and-twenty years ago," writes the Sussex lady, to whom I am so much indebted, " there stood a gibbet within sight of the high road that wound up Beeding Hill, our nearest way to Brighton Among my nurse's fearful stories about it was one relating to the curing of a wen by the touch of the dead murderer's hand, and she described most graphically the whole frightful scene: how the patient was taken under the gallows in a cart, and was held up in order that she might reach the dead hand, and how she passed it three times over the wen and returned home cured. This practice has happily become extinct with the destruction of the gibbet; but the remedy of a dead hand is still sometimes resorted to. Not very long ago, in the neighbouring village of Storrington, a young woman afflicted with goitre was taken by her friends to the side of an open coffin in order that the hand of the corpse might touch it thrice." It may be observed that they say in North Germany that tetters and warts disappear if touched by the hand of a corpse.

source: Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders, by William Henderson, 1878